by Alan Furst
“You must take a cognac with us,” Stein said.
A waiter brought small gilt chairs. Jammed together at the table they were pleasantly crowded, breathing an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and perfume and body heat and breaths of oranges and mints and wine. The count’s white-and-black hair was combed back smoothly and rested lightly atop his ears.
“A celebration tonight,” Stein said.
“Oh?” said the count.
“I became, today, a charbonnier.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“A coal merchant, eh? Well, you must permit us to be your customers. Shall you haul the sacks down the cellar stairs?”
“Absolutely, you may depend on it.”
“A Polack!”
“Exactly!”
“Stein?”
“Yes?”
“You’re an amusing fellow.”
They sipped at their balloon glasses of cognac. “What year?” said the count.
“Nineteen ten.”
“Alas, before your time,” the count said to Madame Roubier.
“Yes? It’s your guess?”
“My certain knowledge!”
“Dear me, how is one to repay such a compliment?”
The taxi that served as limousine took them home from a nightclub at dawn, the snow turned gray in the January light. Madame Roubier snored by his side in the backseat. She slept snuggled up to him, the ermine warm against his cheek.
Success purchased investment. Perhaps you fought, with luck you won, then came the little men with the money. Vyborg had made a point of telling him that, because Vyborg knew exactly who de Milja really was. Vyborg knew how happy he’d been fussing over his maps, knew about his academic papers, worked over endlessly, on the signalization of braiding, or aggrading, rivers. He’d spent his daily life occupied with the Lehman system of hachuring, the way in which the angle of slope is shown on military surveys—important knowledge for artillery people—contour intervals, hydrographic symbolism. He was, in Vyborg’s words to Sixth Bureau staff meetings, “his father’s very own son.” He was, in fact, a man whose physical presence to some degree betrayed his personality. He wanted to be a mole who lived in libraries, but he didn’t look like that, and the world didn’t take him that way.
His mother, de Milja thought, would have made a good spy. She was deceptive, manipulative, attractive—people wanted to talk to her. The world she lived in was a corrupt and cynical place where one had to keep one’s guard up at all times, and the probable truth of her opinions had often been the subject of a sort of communal sigh privately shared by de Milja and his father.
But the chief resident intelligence officer for France had to be an executive, not a cartographer. De Milja’s quarterly budget was 600,000 francs; rental of safe houses, agents’ pay, railroad tickets, hotels, endless expenses. Bribes were extra. The money for Huysmanns was extra—and it had been made clear to de Milja that the company had to succeed and profit.
Instinctively, de Milja knew what he would find at Huysmanns Coal. He knew Huysmanns—phlegmatic, northern, Belgian. Profit earned a franc at a time, dogged patience, do we really need all these lights on? Would such a man employ a troupe of merry philosophers?
Never. Thus the man de Milja needed was already in place, right there in Huysmanns’s office overlooking the coal yard by the railroad tracks. Monsieur Zim-maire it was said. Zimmer, an Alsatian, fifty or so, who wore a clean, gray dustcoat every day, buttoned all the way to the knees. At one time or another he’d taken a hand in everything the company did. He’d driven the trucks, hauled sacks of coal, a job that turned the deliveryman black by the second or third call. He talked to the suppliers, the mines in northern France, and he knew the important customers: hospitals and office buildings and workshops. There were two secretaries who kept the books and sent out the bills, Helene and Cybeline. At Zimmer’s suggestion, they fired Cybeline. She was a distant relation of Huysmanns—that didn’t matter to Zimmer or de Milja but she insisted it meant she didn’t have to work. She filed her nails, sipped coffee, gossiped on the phone and flirted with the drivers. As for Helene, who actually did the work, she got a raise.
Zimmer, too, got a raise. He would, in fact, be running the company. “I’ll be seeking out new customers,” was the way de Milja put it. “So I expect to be traveling a good part of the time.”
That was true. The Sixth Bureau had directed him to assist in certain British operations against Luftwaffe units based in France. The nightly bombing was relentless. Something had to be done.
8 March 1941.
West of Bourges, de Milja pedaled a bicycle down a cow path. Early spring morning, raw and chilly, the ground mist lying thick on the fields. Leading the way, a Frenchman called Bonneau. Perhaps thirty, a tank officer wounded and captured in late May of 1940. Sent to a POW camp, a munitions factory near Aachen. Escaped. Recaptured. Escaped again, this time reached France and made it stick.
Riding just ahead of de Milja, Bonneau’s sister Jeanne-Marie, perhaps twenty, thin and intense and avid to fight the Germans. Through a prewar association—something commercial, Bonneau had sold British agricultural equipment in central France—he’d gotten in touch with somebody in London, and his name had been passed to the special services.
De Milja liked him. Forthright, handsome, with a scrupulous sense of honor. The best of the French, de Milja thought, were the incarnations of heroes in boys’ books. Or girls’ books—because the principle was twice as true for the French women. De Milja had seen them face down the Germans more than once; iron-willed idealists, proud and free, and quite prepared to die to keep it that way.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Gache,” Bonneau called out, coasting on his bicycle. Jeanne-Marie echoed the greeting.
Monsieur Gache was a fourteenth-century peasant. He’d loomed up through the milky-gray mist holding a long switch, surrounded by a half-dozen cows, their breaths steaming, bells clanking. He squinted at de Milja from beneath a heavy brow, his glance suspicious and hostile. He knew every pebble and cowpie in these fields—perhaps this stranger was aiming to help himself to a few. Well, he’d know about it soon enough.
It’s spring, start of the war season in Europe, de Milja thought. And Monsieur Gache knew, in some ancient, intuitive sense, exactly who he was and what his appearance meant. Nothing good, certainly. Caesar likely sent somebody up here in the spring of 56 b.c. to take a look at the Gauls—and there was Monsieur Gache and his six cows.
“That’s old Gache,” Bonneau called back to him. “It’s his uncle’s land we’ll be using.”
De Milja grunted assent, implying that it seemed a good idea. He hoped it was. This was something worked out between people in the countryside, such rural arrangements being typically far too complicated to be successfully explained to outsiders.
They pedaled on for fifteen minutes, threading their way among great expanses of plowed black earth separated by patches of old-growth forest, oak and beech, left standing as windbreak. The cow path ended at a small stream and Bonneau dismounted like a ten-yearold, riding a little way on one pedal, then hopping off.
“Oop-la!” he said with a laugh. He grinned cheerfully, a man who meant to like whatever life brought him that day. Wounded during the German attack, he had fought on for twelve hours with only a gunner left alive in his tank.
“Now, sir, we shall have to walk,” Jeanne-Marie said. “For, perhaps, twenty-five minutes.”
“Exactly?” de Milja said.
“In good weather, close to it.”
“If she says it, it’s probably true,” Bonneau said wearily, admiring his sister and teasing her in the same breath.
“Here is the Creuse,” she said, pointing across a field.
They could see it from the hill, a ribbon of quiet water that flowed through brush-lined banks and joined, a few miles downstream near the town of Tournon, the Gartempe. This in turn became part of the Loire, and all of it eventually emptied into the Atlantic at the p
ort of Saint-Nazaire.
What mattered was the confluence of the rivers—a geographical feature visible from an airplane flying on a moonlit night. They walked on in silence. The field was a good distance from any road, and therefore a good distance from German motorized transport. If the Germans saw parachutes floating from the sky, they were going to have to organize an overland expedition to go see about the problem.
The field itself had been chosen, de Milja thought, with great care. “It’s Jeanne-Marie’s choice,” Bonneau explained. “She is a serious naturalist—turns up everywhere in the countryside, so nobody notices what she does.”
“I’ve paced it more than once,” Jeanne-Marie said. “It is as suggested, about 650 by 250 yards.”
They walked its perimeter. “There were stumps, but I had our workmen haul them out with the plow horses.” Silently, on behalf of a descending parachutist, de Milja was grateful for her forethought. He saw also that somebody had moved big stones to one side of the field.
“How many people will you have?” de Milja asked.
“Four, perhaps. Six altogether.”
“You’ll need brushwood for your fires. It’s best to store it under canvas to keep it dry. Then the fires should be set in the shape of an arrow, giving wind direction.”
“Yes,” Jeanne-Marie said. “We know that.”
De Milja smiled at her. The mysterious foreigner who came from nowhere and told them things they already knew. She stood, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, in front of a huge French spring sky; a few strands of hair had escaped from the front of her kerchief and she brushed them back impatiently.
“Shall we have something before we go back?” Bonneau said.
Jeanne-Marie grinned to herself and nodded yes. She untied a cloth-wrapped packet from the back of her bicycle. They sat on the rim of the field—true to the suggested standard, Jeanne-Marie had located a slightly concave area—and ate bread and crumbly farm cheese and last fall’s apples, dried-out and sweet.
“Something must be done, and we hope it is soon,” Bonneau said. “The people here don’t like the Germans, but they are drifting. Pétain speaks on the radio and says that all this has happened to us because France was immoral and self-indulgent. A number of people believe that, others will do whatever makes them comfortable at that moment. One lately hears the word attentisme—the philosophy of waiting. Do nothing, we’ll see what happens next. This is dangerous for France, because here we don’t really live in a country, you know. We live in our houses with our families, that’s our true nationality, and what’s best is determined from that point of view.”
It was Jeanne-Marie who answered her brother. “The English will do what they can,” she said, a snap in her voice. “But not from any tender feeling for the French. We’re allies, not friends.”
“Again she’s right,” de Milja said.
A local train west, then to Nantes, then north on a series of locals. Very, very careful now, he told himself. Where he was going the Germans were sensitive, because they had a secret.
As the train rolled to a stop at each little town, de Milja could see he was in the country of Madame Roubier. Brittany. Tall redheads with fair, freckled skin. Sharp-eyed—not easily fooled. Often venal, because it was them against the world, had always been so, and this unending war was fought with wealth.
It was late afternoon when he reached the town of Vannes, down the coast of Brittany from L’Orient, one of the bomber fields used in the Luftwaffe campaign against Britain. North from Vannes was Brest—on the south shore of the widening English Channel, across from Plymouth, on the Cornish coast. No doubt about the bomber field, Vannes railroad station was full of German airmen, returning from leave or heading off to sinful Paris for ten days.
De Milja kept his eyes down. Cheap leather briefcase in hand, felt hat with brim turned down, well-worn blue suit. A provincial lawyer, perhaps, snuffling out a living from feuding heirs and stubborn property owners and the tax indiscretions of petits commerçants. He walked for a long time, toward the edge of town. No more Germans. Sidewalks that narrowed, then vanished. Old women with string bags, a few cats. The neighborhood darkened—buildings crumbling softly into genteel poverty, a grocery store with a sign on the boarded window: fermé.
Finally, a confiserie—a candy shop, the miniature gold-foil packets of chocolates in the window covered with a layer of fine dust. A bell jangled above the door as he entered and a young girl stood to attention behind the counter. She was very plain, skin and hair the same washed-out color, and wore a tight sweater that was more hopeful than seductive. The smell of candied violets and burnt sugar was intense in the dark interior of the shop. It made de Milja feel slightly queasy.
“Mademoiselle Herault?” he asked the clerk.
“In back, Monsieur.” Her voice was tiny.
Mademoiselle Herault sat at a desk in the office. She was in her forties, he guessed. But older than her years. A hard face, lined and severe. As though she dealt in candy from contempt for human appetite, not a desire to sell the world something sweet. Or maybe it was the silent store, the trays of stale orange drops, a small business failing by slow, agonizing degrees.
He identified himself—Guillaume for this meeting, and her eyes searched his, to see if he could be trusted. She was, he thought, not a particularly attractive woman, but she had probably never lacked for lovers, being one of those women who understands that attraction hasn’t much to do with it.
“May I take a minute of your time?” he asked.
She looked at him a little sideways—minutes, hours, she had nothing but time. Very slowly she worked a Gauloise free of its pack, tapped one end against her thumbnail, held it in her mouth with thumb and forefinger, handed de Milja a box of matches and leaned toward him so he could light it. “Thank you,” she said.
She opened a drawer in the desk, searched through papers, found an unsealed envelope and handed it to him. “Here it is,” she said.
He took out what looked like a polite note, written in purple ink on bordered paper sold in stationery stores. His eyes ran along the lines, trying to decipher the penmanship. Then, when he realized what he had, he read it through again.
“This is—this is extremely important,” he said.
She nodded in a sort of vague agreement—yes, so it seemed to her. She drew on her Gauloise and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling.
“Was there a reason you did so much? The occupation?”
“No,” she said. “I am not French,” she added.
“What then?”
“I’m a Pole, though I’ve lived here a long time.”
De Milja came close to responding in Polish. He wanted to—then raged at himself for being so stupid. Guillaume was Guillaume— nobody. “Herault?” he said.
She shrugged. “That was my father’s attempt to fit in.”
“Did he fit in?”
“No,” she said. They were silent for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll tell you any reasons,” she said. “For what I’ve done, that is. I don’t especially believe in reasons.”
De Milja ran his eyes back over the paper. Kampfgeschwader 100, Pathfinder, Knickbein beam. De Milja was stunned at the quality of what he had in hand. He’d gotten the woman’s name from Fedin—an old contact from the late ’30s, nothing very productive, but an address that placed her, quite by accident, on the front line of the German offensive against Britain. Fedin had made the initial contact, then a signal from Vannes reached Paris that meant I have something for you. But this was well beyond anything de Milja had expected.
“Please, Mademoiselle. I must ask you to tell me how you managed this.”
A ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face. She found his urgency a little bit pleasing. She nodded her head toward the front of the shop. “Veronique,” she said.
“Who?”
“My little clerk.”
She almost laughed out loud, so stupid and lost did he look. Then, when she saw the mist cle
ar, she said, “Yes, that.”
“By design?”
She made a face: who could say? Paused a moment, leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Ugly as sin, poor thing. But for everyone there is someone, and for poor Veronique there is poor Kurt. Eighteen, away from home for the first time, short, homely, with bad teeth and bad eyes. In his unit the lowest of the low: he helps the mechanics who fix the aircraft. I believe engine parts are washed in gasoline. Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“He does mostly that. Red hands the result. But he is a conqueror, Monsieur Whatever-you-call-yourself. And he has discovered, in this shapeless lump of a child, le vrai passion. He drives her, I assure you, to the very edge of sanity. No, beyond.”
“And in bed, he tells her things?”
“No, Monsieur. Men don’t tell women things in bed. Men tell women things when they are trying to get them into bed. To let women know how important they are. Once in bed, the time for telling things is over.”
“But Veronique continues.”
“Yes. She loves Kurt. He is her man, hers alone. National borders are here transcended. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Of course they do chatter, in the way people do, and she tells me things—just to gossip, just to have something to say. They are innocent, Monsieur.”
De Milja nodded sympathetically.
“Someday, you might be asked to do something for Veronique.”
“What is that?”
“Well, national borders are never transcended. Love doesn’t conquer all. In Veronique’s mind, the Germans will be here for forty years. Should she wait until she’s fifty-nine to go on with life? Of course not. Unfortunately for her, I suspect the end of this war may come sooner than forty years. And then, the women who have made love with the enemy will not fare well. The people here who have collaborated silently, skillfully, the ones who talk but do nothing, they will take it out on the poor Veroniques of the world. And they can be very cruel. When this happens, perhaps I will find you, or somebody like you, and you will try to do something for poor Veronique.”
